Somewhere, G. Harrold Carswell is Smiling

G. Harrold Carswell was a judge nominated to the Supreme Court by President
Richard Nixon in 1970. Carswell's record was attacked by civil rights leaders
and feminists, and his nomination was rejected by the Senate. Nixon's next
nominee, Harry Blackmun, won easy confirmation so the country made out fairly
well.

One of the accusations against Carswell was that his record was mediocre.
Senator Roman Hruska unintentionally drove the final nail in Carswell's coffin
with a remark that made both him and Carswell a national laughingstock:

Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and
lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a
little chance?"

Hruska and Carswell have the last laugh. The mediocre have their
representation. And they are not giving it up without a fight.

The Stupid, It Burns

A piece called "Republicans
in the wilderness" by Thomas Sowell (WorldNetDaily, June 23, 2009) begins:

A Gallup poll last week showed that far more Americans describe themselves as
"conservatives" than as "liberals." Yet Republicans have been clobbered by the
Democrats in both the 2008 elections and the 2006 elections.

In a country with more conservatives than liberals, it is puzzling - in fact,
amazing - that we have the furthest left president of the United States in
history, as well as the furthest left speaker of the House of Representatives.

Republicans, especially, need to think about what this means. If you lose
when the other guy has all the high cards, there is not much you can do about
it. But, when you have the high cards and still keep taking a beating, then you
need to rethink how you are playing the game.

The current intramural fighting among Republicans does not necessarily mean
any fundamental rethinking of their policies or tactics. These tussles among
different segments of the Republican Party may be nothing more than a
long-standing jockeying for position between the liberal and conservative wings
of that party.

If you lose when you have all the high cards, that is indeed a mystery.
Unless you think 4's, 5's and 6's are high cards. Or unless you think A-K-Q-J-J
beats A-2-3-4-5. Then you're just ignorant about the game.

This is not a struggle between the liberal and conservative wings of the
Republican Party. What's going on in the wake of the 2006-2008 disasters is a
battle between the intelligent and the stupid wings of the party. And the
stupids look at your A-K-Q-J-10 and their J-3-7-5-4, and say "Jack is a nickname
for John, 7 + 5 + 4 =16, my hand says John 3:16, I win," and rake in the pot.
And refuse to listen when you bring out the rule book, because their reasoning
is based on the Bible.

Sowell goes on:

A corollary to this is that Republicans have to come up with alternatives
to the Democrats' many "solutions," rather than simply be naysayers.

However plausible all this may seem, it goes directly counter to what has
actually happened in politics in this generation. For example, Democrats
studiously avoided presenting alternatives to what the Republican-controlled
Congress and the Bush administration were doing, and just lambasted them at
every turn. That is how the Democrats replaced Republicans at both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue.

When the other guy is digging himself into a hole, why present alternatives? The alternative to doing stupid things is to stop doing stupid things.

What we are seeing now is not "a long-standing jockeying for position between
the liberal and conservative wings of that party." A contest between the liberal
and conservative wings of the Republican Party would pit Nelson Rockefeller against
Barry Goldwater, or Colin Powell versus Newt Gingrich. No, what we have is a
battle between the intelligent and the stupid wings of the Republican Party. And
the stupids finally have control, and they are not giving it up.

The great cartoonist Pat Oliphant did a cartoon about 1970, showing Richard
Nixon as a small child with a blissfully idiotic grin on his face, bashing an
alarm clock with a hammer. Every time I think of the state of the Republican
Party in 2009, I see that cartoon. The Stupids have the hammer, and they are
blissfully bashing everything in sight.

The Birthers Reach a New Low

The conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not really an American citizen hit
a new low in absurdity in late July, 2009 when an attorney posted what he
claimed was an official copy of a Kenyan birth certificate on line. Within a
day, the certificate was exposed as a hoax, a retouching of an Australian
birth certificate lifted off a genealogy web site. The actual owner learned a
sobering but relatively painless lesson in identity theft. After all, the
certificate was merely retouched, not used to take out a credit card or
passport.

When I saw the certificate, my first question was why a supposedly recent
official copy was folded and worn. So I fully expected fakery. But I was
astonished that the fakery was so downright clumsy. I mean, at least the birthers could have used a certificate from the right continent. In short order, there were
sites that allowed users to create their own fake Kenyan birth certificates.

This simply leaves me shaking my head in astonishment. How divorced from
reality does someone have to be to think a forgery like this will accomplish
anything? Divorced enough to be a Ron Paul supporter, apparently, because there
are raging arguments on some Ron Paul sites about the authenticity of the
certificate. Many of the people arguing the certificate is genuine are fully
capable of seeing fakery in 9/11 videos or Apollo moon landing photos.

Lower than Low?

According to Andy Borowitz on BorowitzReport.com (December 11, 2009,
summarized on Huffington Post on December 15, 2009), Barack Obama's delivery of
Hanukkah greetings in Hebrew has some Birthers now claiming he was born in
Israel: "Orly Taitz, a leading Birther spokesperson, told CNN today that she had
in her possession a birth certificate for Mr. Obama that was issued in Tel
Aviv.'If you look at the birth certificate, you will see the name he was born
with, Baruch Obama,' she said."

I'm not totally sure this isn't a hoax, not that I don't believe Birthers can
be that stupid, but life just serves up such juicy targets so rarely.

1968: Deja Vu All Over Again

Both conservatives and liberals can
learn lessons from 1968 about the disruption of Town Hall meetings.

For liberals, the time to worry about civility of discourse was 1968.
Remember all the conservative speakers who have been shouted off the podium over
the years? What goes around, comes around.

For conservatives, remember 1968. I recall hearing about the riots at the
Democratic National Convention while at geology field camp in the High Sierra,
16 miles from the nearest road. To listen to the radio commentary, blood was
ankle deep in the streets, Cossacks were riding through the crowd slashing with
sabers, and a baby carriage was bouncing down the steps of the convention center
straight into the melee. To this day, the 1968 Democratic National Convention is
enshrined in liberal mythology as an example of archetypal police state
brutality. Unfortunately, when I got out of the mountains, almost everyone I
talked to, outside the confines of a college campus, seemed to feel the protesters
got pretty much what they deserved.

Seven of the ringleaders of the riots went on trial for criminal conspiracy.
They turned the trial into a circus, were sentenced for contempt of court, then
were convicted. In one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history,
both the convictions and the contempt sentences were overturned.

The result? Despite the Democrats running Hubert Humphrey, a strong candidate and possibly
the most honorable man in my lifetime not to be elected, Richard Nixon won the
election. Then, in 1972, in a virtual referendum on the Sixties, Nixon crushed
George McGovern, who carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
Nixon's involvement in Watergate discredited Republicans badly enough to give
the election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, but then Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980
and 1984, followed by George Bush in 1988.

So go on. Keep screaming and disrupting meetings. Give the media nice video
bites of unattractive, inarticulate people screaming and ranting. See how well
it worked for liberals in 1968.